Monday, January 03, 2011

Chicken Business

Happy New Year everybody! Hey, let's skip the part about how I've barely touched this blog thing here lately and jump right into a discussion of chicken business! Exclamation points!

What is chicken business, you ask? Well for starters, it's fun as fuck to say. Go ahead, give it a shot. Say it out loud. If anyone in earshot of you asks what you're doing, just look them in the eye and say it again.

Chicken business.

Chicken business.

Chickennnnn. Bizzznessss.

That's nice, isn't it? Perhaps it evoked certain images in your head, hmmm? Chickens exchanging currency for goods or services? Little chickens in little business suits squawking over their little deals? A rooster in a limo pulling up to a corner where stands a fake-fur-clear-heel-clad hen of the night?

Well, you're wrong, dirty and wrong. Chicken business is nothing of the sort. Except, I suppose, when it is.

Here be a picture of a hen:

This is one of our hens. She is of the breed known as Barred Rocks, and she sits at the top of the pecking order among our little flock. She doesn't have a name, but an apt one for her would probably be Busy since she conducts the aforementioned but as yet undefined chicken business.

Here is a picture of a backyard playset:

Ignore the snow. It never snows in Austin except for this one time last winter when it did, so I went around taking pictures of everything with snow all over it. Otherwise I would never just take a picture of a kid's playset, which is why I don't have any non-snow pictures of our playset, which is why you have to look at this one with snow all over it. AHEM!

So every now and then, the Barred Rock hen pictured above, who may be named Busy or Business Time or some such, likes to flap her little wings and transport herself up, up, up into the clubhouse section of the playset. It's amazing, really, the way she navigates herself through the little doorway. None of the other chickens do this trick. It's hers and hers alone. Perhaps it's this kind of initiative that propelled her to the top of the pecking order in the first place.

The boys took note of this little feat one day and asked their mom why the chicken was getting into their clubhouse.

"Oh, she's just doing her chicken business," my wife told them.

But wait, that's not all of it. There's more to chicken business than just that. Because you see, whenever Busy flaps up into the clubhouse and the boys are around to see it, they sound the alarm with a cry of "CHICKEN BUSINESS!" and spring into action. They race up to the clubhouse where one of them scoops the poor girl up in their arms and then, well, from there she meets one of two fates. Either she's thrown out the door that she originally flew in through and has to flap her wings furiously in order to prevent an unpleasant reunion with the ground, or else she gets to take a ride down the slide in the lap of whichever boy picked her up.